An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

After the initial set up I wanted to create a root account so it is like my factory Debian. In a terminal I created it by using ($ passwd root) gave it a password and confirmed that it worked by switching accounts in terminal with ($ su root). When I log out of the DE then relogin and this time select different user it won't accept my password for root but it works while in terminal. Did I set this up incorrectly? Also I noticed that when in terminal as normal user I have to click the x in the top right corner to close terminal but while using root in terminal as soon as my mouse hovers over the x to close, it automatically logs out of DE causing me to sign back in. I'm still noobish but that doesn't seem right. Does this happen to anyone else?

If your graphical login is via GDM, then there are GDM policies with PAM restrictions that deliberately block a root login to full X/Wayland sessions. This is normal, and good - it discourages the *nix "worst practice" of general user operations by root.

If you must have a root desktop - and they do sometimes have utility - there are 2 things to do on Debian 10:
1 — Edit (as root/sudo) /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf. In the section for security add the stanza:

Code:

[security]
AllowRoot=true

2 — Edit (as root/sudo) /etc/pam.d/gdm-password”. Comment out the line containing “auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet_success”:

Code:

# auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet_successSave the file and exit.

This is more or less the same for Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives. Probably also Manjaro, etc. as I can't see that their different packagers would much deviate for PAM policies, etc.